25 Years Later, Chernobyl Reinvented as a Tourist Hotspot

As
Fukushima stokes popular fears about nuclear energy, can Ukraine turn
its most infamous disaster into a Disneyland of Soviet-era
devastation?

The ruined nuclear reactor at Chernobyl is seen through deserted buildings in the neighbouring town of Pripyat. Gleb Garanich / Reuters

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- "Did you
drink last night?" Yuri, my chain-smoking guide, asks me as we head
north out of Kiev to the world's most notorious nuclear plant. "If you
have alcohol in your blood, you'll survive longer than other tourists."

My
stomach growls, a mixture of motion sickness and dread as Kiev's dreary
concrete flats give way to snowy fields and forests. I am visiting
Chernobyl a few weeks in advance of today's 25th anniversary of the
reactor's nuclear meltdown. The plant and its surroundings -- the ghost
town of Pripyat, the Red Forest, all cordoned off in a 30-kilometer area
dubbed the "death zone" -- have become a bizarre tourist attraction in
recent years. After being deemed safe a half-decade back, thousands now
make the pilgrimage, a ritual that is part ecological voyeurism, part
morbid curiosity. And, as another nuclear disaster continues to unfold
in Fukushima, Japan, visits to the site are reportedly increasing.

I
ask Yuri how many Ukrainians suffer from health problems. "Define
'healthy people'," he answers with a wry smile. "Ukraine is a
complicated place."

We pass through a series of checkpoints,
where officers lazily run their Geiger counters up and down the outside
of his beat-up car and check our documents. Shortly after being waved
through, I see the remains of a millennium-old village. Once popular
among fishermen and hunters, it's one of several villages now buried
within the earth like a post-apocalyptic version of the Atlantis. The
seedlings of forests, razed after the disaster, are slowly coming back
to life, oblivious to being planted in the world's most radioactive
topsoil.

Over the horizon, I spot a few smokestacks and cooling
towers. I look down at the yellow Geiger counter that Yuri handed me.
It begins to beep faster. The familiar image of a giant reactor, encased
in a steel and concrete sarcophagus, comes into focus. The plant
actually comprises four reactors, the last of which was deactivated in
2000 (though the smoke billowing from one of its chimneys gives off the
eerie, if false, impression that the plant is still active and spewing
isotopes). The government has begun work on a billion-dollar concrete
shell -- said to be the world's largest movable structure, capable of
encasing Notre Dame cathedral -- to shield tourists from radiation that
might seep through the rusting sarcophagus currently in place.

Next
up on the tour is Pripyat, the Soviet-planned city next door to
Chernobyl that was emptied 36 hours after the plant exploded. It looks
much as it did on that fateful April day, except for what has been
looted by vandals, Yuri tells me. The swimming pool, apartment flats,
and Palace of Culture sit empty and strewn with broken glass, like a
Soviet house of horrors. Wires dangle from fluorescent light fixtures. A
black-and-white photo of Soviet premier Konstantin Chernenko stares up
from the floor.

Visiting Chernobyl can feel slightly dream-like
-- a cross between Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road
and Wim Wenders' sepia-toned surrealist film Wings of Desire. I am alone
except for Yuri and a tour group of older Russian shutterbugs bundled
in fur. Ukrainians generally do not visit Chernobyl. Perhaps the wound
has not yet healed -- the half-life of government resentment appears to
outlive that of radiation.

The stories of human suffering are
gruesome. A new United Nations report estimates that as many as 6,000
children in the area suffered from thyroid cancer. "He was producing
stool 25 to 30 times a day," Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of deceased
fireman Vasily Ignatenko, remembers in remembers in Voices From Chernobyl, a collection of narratives compiled by Svetlana Alexievich. "His skin
started cracking on his arms and legs. He became covered with boils.
When he turned his head, there'd be a clump of hair left on the pillow."
After choking on his own internal organs, Soviet authorities came to
toss Vasily's corpse into a cellophane bag.

Nikolai Fomich
Kalugin, a local father, recalls, "And then one day you're suddenly
turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that
everyone's interested in, and that no one knows anything about. You want
to be like everyone else, and now you can't. People look at you
differently. They ask you: was it scary? How did the station burn? What
did you see? And you know, can you have children? The very word
'Chernobyl' is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look at you.
He's from there!"

Back in
Pripyat, the floor of a school cafeteria remains scattered with tiny gas
masks fitted for the small heads of Soviet schoolchildren. "We were
preparing for war, for nuclear war, we built nuclear shelters," Anatoly
Shimanskiy recounts in Voices of Chernobyl. "We wanted to hide from the
atom as if we were hiding from shrapnel. But the atom is everywhere. In
the bread, in the salt. We breathe radiation. We eat it."

Then
there are the ecological tales of woe. Even though wildlife -- moose,
wolves, wild boar -- is finally returning to the exclusion zone,
mutations in plants and animals born with physical deformities are still
reportedly not uncommon. Birds in the area have brains that are on
average 5 percent smaller. The radioactive fallout even affected the
northern reaches of Europe. Lina Selandar, an artist visiting Chernobyl
from Sweden, told me she still does not eat the berries and mushrooms in
her native country.

That may explain why Chernobyl remains the
single most famous site in Ukraine, which is both a blessing and a
curse for Sergii Mirnyi. A Sean Connery-lookalike who was a commander of
the radiation reconnaissance platoon that responded to the disaster in
1986, Mirnyi has made Chernobyl his life work -- even penning a novella
and screenplay about the disaster. The name has become a watchword for Soviet
bungling -- a "monument of failure," in Mirnyi's words -- and the
hazards of splitting atoms to power the planet. But it is now also seen
as a potential gold mine, one the Ukrainian government hopes to turn
into a lucrative international tourist attraction, half a decade after
allowing the first of many unsanctioned tours by private companies.

Ukrainians
such as Mirnyi worry that Chernobyl may become a missed opportunity to
warn the world about the perils of nuclear power and radiation
poisoning, one that has become only more urgent after the plant at
Fukushima began spilling radiation into the air. If the Ukrainian
government succeeds, Chernobyl could become a post-Soviet Disney World
of sorts for disaster tourism rubber-neckers. Yuri, my guide, is wearing
a Hard Rock Chernobyl t-shirt -- a way of cashing in on past
generations of Ukrainians' misery. Mirnyi bemoans that the authorities
recently bulldozed a historic block in the town of Chernobyl to make
room for a park. He called for a boycott of the reactor by local tour
companies but was rebuffed. The lure of tourism dollars is too sweet to
resist.

On the way out of the exclusion zone, a busload of
migrant workers covered in dust -- thousands of Ukrainians still punch
the clock in the town of Chernobyl -- empties out and walks through the radiation
detectors, almost oblivious to the inanity of the exercise. I step onto
the Soviet-era contraption and press my hands to its side. A yellow
light flashes - chisto (clean, or free of radiation). Relieved, I step off.

But
the jig will be up, and all the millions of tourism dollars Ukraine's
government is hoping to reap may very well disappear, if even one of the
thousands of visitors expected to stream through this desolate part of
northern Ukraine steps onto this machine -- and it doesn't flash yellow.